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13-May-08

A group of Adsense publishers received emails yesterday requiring that they log into the Adsense panel and accept the new terms and conditions (or else!). Turns out it wasn’t a phishing attack and there are no new terms. The message was sent by mistake to users that have already accepted. Google is sorry. The terms were last updated in February so if you accepted them then you’re a-okay to keep publishing.

Hi again,
The latest update: We’ve found that a number of emails were sent incorrectly to publishers who had already accepted the updated Terms and Conditions in the past…To clarify, the most recent update to the Terms and Conditions occurred at the end of February, and there haven’t been any changes since. If you already accepted the Terms and Conditions after they were updated in February, you won’t need to re-accept them, and you won’t be prompted to do so when you log in. Our team will be following up in the next few days via email with those publishers who received a reminder in error. I apologize for the scare today — thanks for letting our team know about this issue.

06-Sep-07

I wrote a while back about my strugglesopening.docx files. Though not exactly obscure, they were new at the time and presented an unnecessary headache when all I wanted to do was read the document. Today I was presented with another new-to-me file extension: .hqx

Some other people who also received the document complained about being unable to open the file (so suddenly I became interested in what might be inside, motivating me to open my mail too). A little experimenting has shown that Open Office opens the file quite nicely, with all formatting preserved. Textpad was also able to open it although in text-only (naturally) so the fancy indenting and emphasis, etc were stripped.

For those interested in the details, .hqx is the file extension for BinHex encoded files. From Wikipedia:

BinHex, short for “binary-to-hexadecimal”, is a binary-to-text encoding system that was used on the Mac OS for sending binary files through e-mail. It is similar to Uuencode, but combined both “forks” of the Mac file system together, along with extended file information. BinHexed files take up more space than the original files, but are far less likely to be corrupted in transit.

25-Apr-07

I want a Firefox tinyurl plugin to save me from having to go to the tinyurl site every time I want to share a ghastly url. It’s a pita every time I want to post a longish link in a forum or email. I found TinyUrl Creator so I’ll give it a try. If you’ve got a better one let me know.

16-Mar-07

Another idea for dealing with the .docx files that Does Not Work!

It’s still bothering me that a user cannot simply and easily open these files and work with them. I had another idea: Gmail now includes the option to open some files as Google documents — would this work with the dread .docx?

I tested it out by ‘gmailing’ myself some attachments and here are the results. While I was at it I tested out a few other formats (more…)